In March Twitter visitors jumped 131% to 9.3 million. That’s up by 5 million more visitors over February. Comscore speculated, based on the data, that the popularity of Twitter could be increasing with additional mainstream news media attention on the service. News stories about Twitter involving the use of the service by politicians, journalists, and news organizations is clearly helping to fuel the growth of Twitter.

ComScore backed up this hypothesis by developing a data table showing cross visiting numbers between news website visitors and visitors from Twitter. Based on the data there is clearly a strong relationship between the two. As Andrew Lipsman from comScore puts it, Twitter’s growth seems the be from a “virtuous cycle occuring between breaking news and making news that is feeding on itself”.

Brian’s Opinion
I’ve been wondering why Twitter is so hot all of a sudden and I think the folks at comScore have hit the nail on the head. There has been an increase in the amount of news coverage Twitter has received. The social website seems to have woven itself into popular culture.

I just think it’s kind of funny that Twitter has just been sitting idle for months and then out of the blue the website spikes in its number of unique visitors. That’s usually what happens when a website goes hot in a short amount of time though. The increase in the amount of unique visitors year to year and now month to month it really breathtaking.

What’s important for Twitter to do now is to monetize its service. They have all of these visitors and there doesn’t seem to be an effective plan on how Twitter can generate a profit from them. I know the first equation for a popular website is getting the traffic. Now that Twitter has the traffic it will be interesting to see what they do with it.